As to the original, there's a lot of commentary in a lot of places about how 'modern atheism is depicted as a war of science against religion', but when it is it's typically by a religious mindset that feels under threat.
The times I've ever seen this idea expressed has generally been the other way round, O. I've heard far more religious people state, as I do, that there is no dichotomy or gulf between faith and science, and therefore no 'war'.
This was, at least in part, the point I was trying to make, that we're talking at crossed-purposes a lot of the time. We aren't depicting science as an alternative to religion, but that (apprently) is how it's coming across. At the same time, we see people putting religious explanations as alternatives to scientific ones - superior alternatives, in some eyes - and we take those few examples as representative.
To the majority of the vocal atheists that are typically referred to there is no war between science and religion, there's a war between religion and reason or a war between religion and decency - science is deployed as a weapon against the nonsense claims of religion, not as an alternative.
Again, this is not the impression that I have got from the various talks I've heard and books I've read over the decades.
I can't see where you can get that from - which is not to say that you don't, it's just not how it comes across to me. I can see where people would look at, say, Ken Ham and deduce that Christians believe the literal truth of the Old and New Testament - it's wrong to deduce that from a small cross-section, but I can see how it happens. What I can't see is where religious people see someone using the findings of science to undermine the precepts of religion to show that it's false as attempting to replace religion with science: science tells us how things (probably) happen, but it doesn't tell us very much at all about what we ought to be doing about it.
Except that the use of the term 'ancient fairy tales' (a derogatory one if ever there was one) undermines this apparently conciliatory approach. The fact that some highly educated people are both scientists and hold a religious belief indicates that 'educating' people doesn't inevitably result in people having a reduced need for something beyond science.
Religion doesn't have any feelings to be upset, and even if it did it would have no right not to take offence. Part of the movement of the vocal atheists is to stop the irrational and unjustified reverence with which religion is viewed - Christianity is no different to Norse mythology in any meaningful way except the number of people who haven't put the story down yet and moved on.
In fact, it actually reinforces the idea of a war between science and religion, something that, despite your earlier denials, seems to be very much the message of the atheist, rather than the religious.
What is there that is 'science' about pointing out the New Testament is a fairy story? If I address the literalist claims of a young Earth with radiological dating, that's science being used as a tool to demonstrate the false precepts of a religious viewpoint. Pointing out that Genesis is on a par with the Silmarillion is not 'a war between science and religion', it's evidence of a war between rationality and primitive superstition.
That I can be both rational and scientific, as the situation warrants, doesn't mean that the two are inseperable - arguably science is a subset of rationality, perhaps.
O.
